I recently switched my mail/domain from Google to name cheap. I’ve been keeping a critical eye on my junk mail as the spam filtering doesn’t seem as good.

I saw neat scam email from my own email adress. It was the usual “I am a hacker give me money” nonsense but the trick with them using my own email adress is pretty neat. I assume they’ve injected some sort of common replace string?

Just curious if anyone knows the trick here.

Update: followed the advice most of you have provided and spam mail has gone way down as a result. Leaving post here for the next poor sod who runs into these problems. Maybe Google will lead folks here instead of reddit.

Thank you kind strangers.

  • rufus
    2·
    10 months ago

    I’ve tried and lots of providers want the PTR. I think Gmail is espectally strict when it comes to antispam, doing the DNS lookups and checking IP ranges. I forgot what gets you into the spam folder and what gets your mail rejected completely. You’re right with the MX record though. I think I misremembered whatever I configured in Postfix. SPF is the way for that.

    But I just follow suit with the big providers and am very strict with the incoming mail. I need to look it up, but i think i refuse them if the mailserver doesn’t have any dns records at all. And if it sends something silly in the HELO. With mailchimp or mailinglists, isn’t the way to do it to set mailchimp in the envelope-from and your company into the from header? and then I can check at least that mailchimp this is a proper mailserver? If you don’t set it up properly, you kinda deserve your mail getting lost.

    But I think now I know where we don’t understand each other. I just check if it’s a proper mailserver with the first few checks. That gets rid of >>50% of my spam immediately. I don’t use that to verify the mailserver is allowed to send mail for that specific domain. That’s a job for SPF later. It just needs to have anything. And that’s enough to weed out most of the spam, especially from hacked boxes and crude IPs from the far east.

    One exception. I have a specific list with servers allowed to send mail from my own domain. This prevents phishing and impersonating people internally. Nobody except me is supposed to configure mailing campaigns or mailing lists anyway. But now that we’re speaking of it, I think I should get rid of that extra config and use SPF for that. I configured that years ago, anyways.